Shachar, Hila

I joined the University of Dundee in 2024 as a Lecturer in English and Film. I have previously worked as a Senior Lecturer in English and Film at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Within this position, I have held held multiple internal leadership roles. I have also taught in English, Communication, and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia. 

Apart from my academic experience, I am also a professional writer and editor, with over 17 years of copywriting, marketing, editing, content strategy, and consultancy experience within numerous industries and fields, including government and policy, entertainment and the arts, tourism and hospitality, philanthropy, charities, museums, NGOs, and media and journalism. As part of this work, I have won large-scale business awards for clients through market research and copywriting of grant and award bids, as well as interviewed victims of war crimes and Holocaust survivors and contributed to the writing and copyediting of human rights reports for charities, NGOs, and philanthropic organisations.

I have been invited to speak at marketing/PR events by companies such as the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), BBC, Paramount Pictures, and Universal Pictures, I have been interviewed by ABC, BBC, and New York Times journalists, and I have given public talks at The National Theatre, The British Film Institute, and Bankfield Museum.

As a creative writer, I have published memoir and fiction, collaborated with Australian art galleries and artists to produce exhibition programmes, and worked within multiple creative industries, including an ongoing freelance writing role for The Australian Ballet, producing online/blog and print programme copywriting - a brief example is the article, La Petite Mort, which consistently appeared in their Top 10 Most Read Blog Posts in Google Analytics, years after its publication. My work has also been featured in Vogue and ELLE magazines (US, UK, and Australia) and literary journals.

I have published widely in the fields of English, Film, Adaptation, and Creative Writing. My first book, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) was nominated for the 2012 Premier’s Book Awards (Western Australia) and featured in The New York Times. My second book, Screening the Author: The Literary Biopic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) has been praised as a ‘daring and imaginative book’ (Dennis Bingham, Indiana University -- Purdue University Indianapolis, USA), that provides a ‘needed study in this developing field of cinema studies’ (Homer B. Pettey, University of Arizona, USA). The book has won the category of ‘Best Book’ in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Humanities Research Awards (2019) at De Montfort University, UK. I have also co-written the handbook, The Literature Book.

Apart from my books, I have published on subjects including French, American, Jewish, and Australian cinema, memoir writing, the adaptation of literary works from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries into cinema, television, and ballet, the American Beat authors of the 1950s and 1960s, and the biopic genre. I am currently working on research that engages with embodiment in cinematic adaptations and within the wider arts, contemporary Jewish memoir writing, and the cinema of Sofia Coppola, Rama Burshtein, and Mia Hansen-Løve. I am also currently writing my own memoir novel, exploring the links between autobiography and critical practice.

I have been teaching since 2006, and I have a Postgraduate Teaching Certificate from The University of Western Australia. I have taught widely in undergraduate, Masters, and doctoral programmes across an array of disciplines, including English, Film, Screen Studies, Adaptation Studies, Creative Writing, Gender Studies, and Communication. I currently teach in Film, English, and Creative Writing modules, with a strong emphasis on my specialism and expertise in Adaptation Studies. I have also managed multiple courses and teaching teams, and supervised MA and PhD students in an array of topics within English, Film, and Adaptation. In my previous position as Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, I was nominated numerous times for teaching awards by my students.